How Indian Caste Systems Secretly Govern US Workplaces

CULTURE

The Secret Practices Forbidden to Discuss

By Barry Weiss · July 31, 2026 · 6 min read

"I have a dream that my four Indian co-workers will one day work in a company where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their caste."

-Mohandas Luther King

Our CFO had spent three years trying to push a single financial-reporting platform across the finish line. After three years we were maybe half done. He was fully done. I was the head of FP&A. Now I am the CFO with a half-built reporting system.

What was fully built was a 1000-year-old impenetrable wall of two of my highest-performing Indian team members exiling the two darker-skinned Indian hires. No drama or complaints, just unexplained exclusion that no non-Indian could explain, and no light-skinned Indian was willing to.

Tajar gets looped in full-time from the IT side. Senior project manager, right under the CTO. Light-skinned Indian, grew up in London so he’s got the BBC accent. Forty-five, smart, and the most organized guy this side of the Ganges. Definitely Brahmin caste with one explicitly non-Asiatic work quirk: he worked exactly thirty hours a week. Not forty dressed up as thirty. Thirty. At first, I assumed he had some heavy personal stuff going on—a sick relative, a special-needs kid, something. Nope. His parents were healthy, his wife was lovely, and his kids were well-adjusted overachievers. His Tim Ferris-like, high-octane 30 hours were so valuable the company just happily dealt with it.

My number two was Sunny — Sundeep, but nobody called him that — he was twenty-six, raised in Scarsdale, business undergrad degree from Texas, and even lighter skinned than Tajar. He came in after a year at a soul-crushing starter sales job and turned into a mariwari workhorse. Extremely competent and willing to put in sixty plus hour weeks no issue. When I got bumped up to CFO he took my FP&A position. Sunny had two immovable religious holidays on his calendar: Diwali and any Saturday the Texas Longhorns played football.

Despite fifteen years being raised on different continents, and completely inequitable schedules, Tajar and Sunny always got along and worked together great. They just operated on the same cultural wavelength.

Enter Roger (real name Raj) a dark-skinned guy with a noticeable, though manageable, Indian accent. Roger worked like a dog, putting in the same hours as Sunny. He started as the printer-fixing, password-resetting IT grunt. After 18 months he was promoted to junior programmer to help on our project. Unfortunately anything more complex than reloading the copy machine with paper he’d completely fuck up.

Tajar and Sunny were extremely pleasant and friendly to everyone. Everyone except Roger.

At first I chalked this up to his lack of competence, but after a couple months I noticed Roger kept trying to insert himself into Tajar and Sunny’s conversations. Like he’d just wander over while they were talking and they’d either straight-up stop talking and walk away or just ignore him like he was background noise. It looked like standard junior-guy networking, just trying to shoot the shit with the bosses. But Tajar and Sunny’s reaction to him was jarring. Sunny and Tajar were friendly to the Mexican cleaning lady, the local community college interns, everybody. But Roger? He was an outcaste.

It eventually became clear Roger couldn’t handle the job, so we let him go. To replace him, we interviewed a guy I’ll call Kumar. I don’t remember his actual name, but I remember my first impression. Kumar was incredibly dark-skinned. Honestly, the darkest person I’ve seen not born in Africa. He had a thick-Indian accent but interviewed well enough and his resume was solid for a junior programmer. The CTO was okay with him. I was okay with him. But then Sunny and Tajar did something weird: they insisted on interviewing Kumar together. It didn't make much sense since one was Finance and the other was IT, but “team chemistry” or whatever.

The interview lasted, at most, sixty seconds. Me and the CTO quizzically ask them “Well? How did it go?”

They didn’t say he was bad. They didn’t say he was good. They literally stared at us and said nothing. No feedback, no non-committal murmurs, no “okay,” no “let’s pass,” not even a “let us think about it.” Just total bizarre silence. It was as if we asked them to describe a scene from a movie they never even heard of. So we went ahead and hired the junior programmer to help with the project.

Two weeks into Kumar’s tenure, Linda from payroll, a born-and-raised Bronx Italian woman who’s been doing the same job since Bush one was President, and who avoids conflict at all costs, comes into my office. “Hon, Sunny and Tajar came to me and said you gotta fire the new Indian kid or they’re both leaving.” “What? Why?” I ask. Linda responds in her thick Bronx accent, “They mentioned something about his smell but won’t talk more about it and don’t want to talk to you about it either.” I’m sitting there blinking like an idiot. Linda shrugs and leaves my office. We let Kumar go that afternoon. No explanations ever given.

I tried to figure it out myself. I spent a weekend deep in Duck-Duck-Go, Reddit, and even academic rabbit holes. Caste in the modern Indian diaspora, Brahmin-Dalit dynamics, colorism in the Subcontinent, even South Asian body-odor taboos (I suggest you do not approach this). Quora threads, crappy youtube channels with 100 followers, a Stanford paper on hidden hierarchies in Silicon Valley teams. Nothing matched what I had watched play out, and nothing explained the iron veto that made two otherwise reasonable guys, raised in London and NY, ready to quit their jobs rather than work with someone below them.

The project finished a little over a year later, which was a miracle for this sort of thing. A year after that, Sunny moves to Seattle after getting an incredible job offer from a mega-sized company. Back in town to visit his parents a few months after moving to Seattle, Tajar, Sunny and I went to lunch. Right as the food came out I finally asked it straight: “Hey, remember Roger and that Kumar guy? What was that about?” They didn’t deflect, technically. More like the words reached them and didn’t process in their brains. I asked again and got the same nothingness. The conversation moved on as if I had never asked. I even pressed a third time as the bill came joking “it’s on me if you tell me what happened with Roger and Kumar, is it some sort of Indian Brahmin-Untouchables thing.” But again it was as if my words vanished into thin air.